What's haunting here? - Antti Salo

What's haunting here? The soulscape of a Finnish ghost
What's Haunting Here presents tens of the most amazing cases of hauntings in Finland. At the same time, the book ponders what ghosts are or what they could be, and where the need to think about ghosts and tell ghost stories comes from.

The book opens wide views of the Finnish ghost tradition and seems to love its subject. The text is sometimes humorous, sometimes grave. Topics covered include the reasons why ghosts are scary, the goodness and badness of their actions, the erotic relationships of living people with ghosts, how we can get information about ghosts, and many other questions that reach behind ghost sightings recorded in folklore archives.

The separate informational chapters of the book introduce, among other things, spiritualism and ghost hunting, ghosts appearing in our fiction, and the history of hauntings from five thousand years ago. A special addition is five fictionally colored stories that describe the backgrounds of Finland's most famous ghost legends, such as the story of the innocent girl who ended up as the White Maiden of Häme Castle as a victim of Jarl Birger's gust of rage, and the sweetly sad stages of the romance between the beautiful Anna of Lepaa manor and the energetic Maunu Tavasti.

What's Haunting Here is an entertaining read, and at the same time it draws in a common-sense form extensively from the research of folklore, philosophy, religious studies and psychology. So there are small and big questions of life and death, and when learning about ghosts, the reader is inspired to think about man, himself, life - and this world of many possibilities.

The work is also an art book, because the illustrations are wonderful. It contains dozens of works of art from different centuries, all over Europe and beyond, belonging to the subject of the book.